The Restoration of Balance

The Restora­tion of Balance

I stum­bled upon an extremely well-written and infor­ma­tive arti­cle this week: 10 Tips on Writ­ing the Liv­ing Web, by Mark Bern­stein, which I encour­age you to read in its entirety. Con­tin­u­ing to think about the topic I have focused upon the past cou­ple of weeks, why so many folks are blog­ging these days, I was fas­ci­nated by his very first sug­ges­tion: “Write for a Rea­son.” He admon­ishes us to write not just about the mun­dane details of our lives and life expe­ri­ences, but about why those details mat­ter. Per­haps most impor­tantly, he reminds us to write hon­estly and “for your­self; you are, in the end, your most impor­tant reader.”

Another rec­om­men­da­tion that res­onated with me is “[r]ead widely and well, on the web and off, and in your web writ­ing take spe­cial care to acknowl­edge the good work and good ideas of other writ­ers.” When I signed on this evening to write this post, I perused the past week’s entries from my col­leagues here at Write Stuff, as is my cus­tom. I was intrigued to find that, once again, my team­mates and I seem to be “in synch.” d.challener wrote in his March 6, 2007, post, “The Need to Read,” that he has been, of late, in the “longest cre­ative read­ing droughts of my adult life. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to read. It just seems that over the last sev­eral months my tra­di­tional read­ing times have dried up.”

I have been expe­ri­enc­ing the same phe­nom­e­non. Although it seems that I read con­stantly, I finally took stock of the num­ber of unread books that have man­aged to pile up on my book­shelf, night­stand, desk and even the end table in the liv­ing room. What sparked this inven­tory? The arrival yes­ter­day of yet another new book from my book club, Zooba. When I signed up, I thought it would be a very man­age­able and eco­nom­i­cal way to read because, like Net­flix, you cre­ate a queue, list­ing the books you want to receive in the order you want to receive them. Then, once each month, for the stan­dard price of $9.95 (with no charge for ship­ping), you receive the hard­back edi­tion of the book that is in first posi­tion in your queue. I thought that I would fin­ish one book per month eas­ily since I have always been a vora­cious reader and this would allow me to sim­ply add books to my queue as I heard about them with­out hav­ing to go shop­ping. (Although there is no shop­ping I enjoy more than a leisurely stroll through a well-stocked book­store.) Of course, I buy addi­tional books from time to time, so I actu­ally pur­chase more than one per month.

Things worked out as envi­sioned for the first year or so that I belonged to Zooba. But I have really been slack­ing the past few months and have not read nearly enough books to keep up with the com­bi­na­tion of their ship­ments to me and my other purchases.

Why? I have been spend­ing a lot of time not just work­ing on my own blog and this col­umn, but also read­ing other people’s blogs, in addi­tion to my usual daily fare of news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines that I read on-line. And I have been allow­ing this form of read­ing to over­take my read­ing of fic­tion. To my own even­tual detri­ment, I fear.

d.challener observed that “the men­tal process of tak­ing oth­ers’ words and cre­at­ing a mov­ing pic­ture in you head, is uniquely won­der­ful prac­tice for tak­ing the mov­ing pic­tures in your head and encod­ing them into the writ­ten word.” That is a won­der­ful way to describe what hap­pens to us when we curl up in a com­fort­able spot and begin a good novel. There is noth­ing that com­pares with being trans­ported away to the place described on the page, acquainted with the peo­ple who live there, and mes­mer­ized by the events in their lives and the way in which they respond to those occur­rences. Although I love the process of get­ting to know new char­ac­ters, I am a “crea­ture of habit” and am addicted to the com­fort of rou­tines and fam­liar­ity. For that rea­son, I par­tic­u­larly love read­ing fic­tional series, my two favorite being Janet Evanovich’s hys­ter­i­cally funny books about bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and the sto­ries of Father Cavanaugh, his wife Cyn­thia and all the other folks who pop­u­late the fic­tional lit­tle town of Mit­ford in Jan Karon’s books.

Although I have yet to notice that my decreased read­ing of fic­tion has impacted my writ­ing, I worry that, like d.challener noted vis a vis his own writ­ing, that will be the result if this trend is allowed to continue.

I always mean to sit down and read, but some­how I get dis­tracted. I made good progress on my “to read list” for a long time because I made a New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion that, begin­ning Jan­u­ary 1, 2006, I would take a lunch break at least four days out of five (I gave myself one day per week to enjoy going out with cowork­ers and allow for pro­fes­sional sit­u­a­tions where my res­o­lu­tion could not be car­ried out) dur­ing which I would actu­ally take myself out to lunch — no eat­ing in my office — and spend that time read­ing. If you spend forty-five min­utes or so read­ing at least four to five days per week, you would be amazed at how much mate­r­ial you can digest dur­ing your lunch hour (sorry for the bad pun … couldn’t resist).

How­ever, toward the end of the year, I found myself falling back into the old habit of not stop­ping for a lunch break in favor of eat­ing at my desk while work­ing. I need to resume my old rou­tine because it not only assured that I com­pleted more read­ing, it also gave me a refresh­ing men­tal break in the mid­dle of the day which I have also found myself missing.

Grad­u­ally, I also began spend­ing more time read­ing on-line and … you know how that works! It is late at night and you tell your­self, “I really must get some sleep,” but you want to fin­ish read­ing that won­der­ful blog you just stum­bled upon and then, of course, you must leave a com­ment! But then you find an intrigu­ing com­ment left by another reader and you just have to see what else they have to say in their blog, so one more click before you retire won’t hurt. And then you read five or six posts, rather than just one, and find your­self com­ment­ing and read­ing the com­ments entered by other vis­i­tors, and notice another com­ment which makes you think about things dif­fer­ently. So … bet­ter check out his/her blog, too … until the next thing you know it is 1:30 a.m. and Conan O’Brien is sign­ing off in the back­ground as you finally stum­ble toward your bed, think­ing, “I’m going to be so sorry when the alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m.”

Mr. Bern­stein wraps up his arti­cle by advis­ing writ­ers to relax and enjoy writ­ing. “Find a voice and use it,” he says. “Estab­lish a rhythm, so your writ­ing comes nat­u­rally and your read­ers expe­ri­ence it as a nat­ural part of their day or their week.”

I am con­vinced that, in order to estab­lish and main­tain a rhythm, we must first main­tain a healthy bal­ance in our lives between pur­su­ing our own cre­ative ven­tures and expe­ri­enc­ing and learn­ing from oth­ers’ artistry. I have been a musi­cian for vir­tu­ally my entire life. For the past three years, my par­tic­u­lar pas­sion has been the flute. Deter­mined to ful­fill my life­long dream of being a flutist, I pur­chased a begin­ner model, com­menced pri­vate lessons, and soon began per­form­ing as a soloist and in ensem­bles. Part of my jour­ney to becom­ing the best pos­si­ble flutist I can is gain­ing an appre­ci­a­tion of the artistry of the world’s most renowned flutists. It would be impos­si­ble for me to even achieve mere com­pe­tency as a flutist were I not exposed to the play­ing of other, highly accom­plished flutists in order to under­stand their tech­ni­cal prowess, expe­ri­ence their emo­tive play­ing, become informed about and attempt to model their rehearsal meth­ods, etc.

And so it is with writ­ing. To find one’s voice and its rhythm, it is absolutely vital that we read the work of other writ­ers who demon­strate exem­plary tech­ni­cal skills, observ­ing the var­i­ous mech­a­nisms they employ to inspire and move us.

Dur­ing any given day, I lis­ten to and play many dif­fer­ent kinds of music, all of which informs my own music-making on var­i­ous instru­ments. So it is with writ­ing … to be an effec­tive writer within one’s own genre, it is impor­tant to be exposed to as many dif­fer­ent kinds of writ­ing as pos­si­ble in order to learn from each.

A few months ago, Tammi shared an arti­cle in which the author chal­lenged writ­ers to stick to a writ­ing rou­tine, select­ing a time and place and work­ing for a des­ig­nated period of time each and every day. She sug­gested “writ­ers fol­low the 45:15 rule. Basi­cally, work for 45 min­utes and fol­low the ses­sion with a well-deserved 15 minute break.” I wrote then that I did not believe that kind of rigid sched­ule would work for me as a writer, but my track record proves that a “45 minute rule” does work for me as a reader.

So, like d.challener who declared that he is “mak­ing a con­certed effort to fill up the cre­ative tank with some of the books from the two foot stack of books in [his] night­stand,” I am embark­ing upon a cam­paign to restore bal­ance to my read­ing life. I am reaf­firm­ing my res­o­lu­tion to read from the many fic­tional works in my book stacks for at least forty-five min­utes each and every day of the week, whether it is dur­ing lunch, just before bed or at some other time.

And now I am sign­ing off to begin adher­ing to the “45 minute rule” with the top book on the stack: Wicked by Gre­gory Maguire.

How about you? When do you read and what types of works do you enjoy? How do you main­tain a healthy read­ing bal­ance in your life? Is this some­thing with which you also strug­gle? If so, I chal­lenge you to give the “45 minute rule” a try and then let me know how it works for you by leav­ing a comment!

Orig­i­nally pub­lished at Write Stuff.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writing

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